Blood money

So Robert Mugabe has made a donation of 300 million Zimbabwe dollars to the Catholic Church, or to a women’s group, the Marian Association, within the Church. Bishop Patrick Mutume confirmed the donation and said it is to be invested on the money market until a decision is made on how best to use it.

Shame on the Catholic Church for accepting money given in this cynical, calculating way from the bloodied hands of a dictator. Can they not see they are being used again as the dictator has used and abused the Church over and again in the past, for his own shameless political advantage – in this case as a shabby electioneering stunt ? And this from a man who, only a few weeks ago, was openly gloating at the discomfort caused to his nemesis, the fearless Archbishop Pius Ncube, by the state-initiated and CIO- directed campaign to undermine the Bishop’s massive popularity among the millions of victims of mis-rule. That vicious campaign which touched new depths of moral depravity misfired, causing widespread revulsion and hence more damage to its instigators than to the beloved Bishop whose reputation for courage and integrity remains intact. Hence the need on the dictator’s part to recover some of the further ground lost by the disgraceful antics of his CIO/state media mafia.

300 million Zimbabwe dollars, or just over one thousand US dollars in real money…. It represents a pittance to the man who has robbed his nation blind and secured for himself a life of opulence beyond the wildest dreams of his poor, wretched fellow citizens. Surely an insult to God. Were it a sign of true repentance the Biblical measure, taken from the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector (Luke 19), would be a half the dictator’s possessions given to the poor and four times the amount he has ever cheated returned to those he has wronged. On that scale we might see the whole Zimbabwean economy re-floated ! No further need for any assistance from the IMF, and the WFP could call off their campaign to feed two million starving Zimbabweans …

But the size of the gift apart, it was morally wrong of the Catholic Church to accept it. It is blood money received from a man who as Fr. Oskar Wermter has already observed, has effectively excommunicated himself “that is to say put himself outside the community of the Church, by resisting the word of the church and attacking the bishops in a most offensive, vulgar form”. Once again the church has been outmanoeuvred by the wily dictator. The damage having been done however, perhaps the church could make one smart move to redeem something of its moral authority. To this end I would suggest that instead of investing the donation on the money market (sic !) they donate the 300 million to one of the following causes.

• To the orphans, widows and widowers of some of the 20,000 victims of Gukurahundi, whose deaths can fairly be attributed to the man who called in the North Korean military instructors in the early 1980s and who then sent in the notorious Five Brigade under his command
• To the estimated 150,000 former farm workers still homeless and destitute as a result of the chaotic and violent take-over of the commercial farms
• To some of the 700,000 odd victims of Operation Murambatsvina whose homes and business were trashed in 2005, and most of whom are still homeless, unemployed and hungry
• To some of the 2.1 million urban and rural Zimbabweans already dependent upon food aid from the international community through the catastrophic impact of the dictator’s political whims upon the economy
• To a fund in support of some of the 3 to 4 million Zimbabweans (a quarter of the population) now forced into exile in order to survive, and many of whom are living in abject poverty and squalor.

The list could go on, but after all Mugabe’ derisory gift (already halved in value due to hyper inflation (!)) will not go all that far. However to donate the paltry sum, publicly, to such a cause would at least be a token of the Catholic Church’s repentance for allowing a vicious tyrant to use the church (again) to promote his own sickening propaganda.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, church, catholic church, mugabe

This entry was posted by Faithful on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 6:12 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.